The theater looked exactly as I remembered, though. The seats loomed around the ring, facing the platform at the front, and arched doorways stood on either side.
And on that dais—a crumbling statue curved toward the back of the makeshift stage. A sculpture that resembled seven figures worn to time. Bowing or rising, I couldn’t be sure. Few distinct features were visible.
“You’re sure about this?” I asked Ophelia quietly, despite the fact that it was only us. Giving her room to confess what I saw buried in those magenta eyes.
“No,” she sighed, looking to that platform, then back to me. “I don’t think I have a choice, though.”
Clasping a hand around the back of her neck, I hauled her to me and kissed her.I’m with you every step, I said without voicing it.
And for a moment, something in my gut told me not to let go. To never stop kissing her, for fear that I wouldn’t get to again. For fear that everything was about to change.
But we’d learned that the gods and Angels waited for no one.
I stepped back, appreciating her flushed cheeks, and waved a hand at the statue in place of a proper stage. “Be fucking furious,” I repeated what I’d said to her outside the Gates of Angeldust.
“To scorching the Angels,” she said with a determined nod, and she faced that figure. The one we studied all those months ago. The one something had called Ophelia toward on our first visit here, the stone blistering her skin upon contact.
My heart beat so ferociously against my ribs, I thought it would bruise. I stood beside Sapphire, a hand on her namesake mane, and buried all my worries, ready to watch Ophelia reclaim everything she was owed.
After everything she’d been dragged through, every fate she’d never asked for thrust upon her shoulders, I was ready to tear the Angels apart for her. To face down a trapped god with nothing but a blade and my bare hands.
As Ophelia took a step forward, I muttered, “Let’s wake a god, Alabath.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Ophelia
Let’s wake a god.
Tolek’s words rang along my bones as I gripped the pouch containing the emblems at my side. As I turned back to him to pull him down to kiss me one more time, seeking his strength, and ran my fingers through Sapphire’s mane.
Her ice-blue eyes bore into mine. “Let’s wake a god, girl,” I repeated to my pegasus.
Like I had in the other cavern, I summoned a strand of Angellight and sent it whirling above our heads, a chandelier worthy of an Angelic theater ruined by time.
Power buzzed beneath my bones—all the way down to my ravaged spirit—as I approached the front of the theater. The magic of myths brought back to life, of prophecies fulfilled and legends trapped within stone, thundered. My second pulse—the one rioting in my veins since the day I first found Malakai’s spear in our clearing back in Palerman—sprang to a gallop.
It was a rhythm in the dark cave, roaring over the breathing of the man I loved and mythical creature woken beside him. Between each frantic beat, the journey that delivered us here played out in my mind.
Malakai and I, young and naive, sharing such innocent, blissful love in our clearing.
Beat, beat, beat.
Crashing to my knees in my parents’ kitchen when they told me he had died during the Undertaking.
Beat, beat, beat.
The tundra wolves and the Spirits that challenged me through my own ritual.
Beat, beat, beat.
Finding Malakai…then losing him again.
Beat, beat.
Daminius and the immortality ritual, the toppling buildings and losing my father, hearing of Tolek’s injuries and my heart crashing inside my chest. The time his heart stopped beating so briefly, the silence echoing in the infirmary.
Beat, beat.
